How to Make a Tasty Salad + Salad Dressing Every Time | #BigAssSalad

one of my superpowers one of the things that I'm really good at is making really delicious salads and I think a big reason for this is the fact that from age 9 until age 27 I ate nothing but raw vegan food so during that time I didn't go out to eat I didn't have people prepare food for me unless it was my parents and I had to learn how to make enjoyable meals out of raw fruits vegetables nuts seeds and grains so I learned how to make really tasty salads because they would fill me up they would say she ate me and then life was just a little bit more pleasant in this video I want to pass on the love to you and I want to show you how to make a tasty salad every single time it's actually quite easy but there are some tips and tricks to be had so I want to show you those and I also want to break down how to make a delicious dressing because making dressing is just about the easiest thing that you can do and yet this is something that people are afraid of people often go to the store to get a dressing let me spend lots of money on something that doesn't taste that good and something that's not that helpful so in this video I'm going to show you how to make a tasty salad I'm also going to show you how to make a delicious salad dressing to boot enough dilly-dallying let's hop to it undoubtedly somebody in the comments is gonna go hey Sergei what about a recipe for the salad and my answer to that is you don't get a recipe and the reason you don't get a recipe is because it's much more important that you guys understand the fundamentals of how to make a tasty salad then if I were to teach you to follow a recipe you may not have these exact ingredients in your refrigerator and I don't really want you to go to the store and take time out of your day to go get the exact ingredients I'm using I would much rather describe to you how a perfect salad gets formed and then have you just improvise and you know make your own salad at home truth be told I'm making the salad up as I go I just found a bunch of fresh ingredients that I had on hand and I'm gonna put them together in a way that's going to be incredibly delicious but as start this video I don't really have any idea of what it's going to look like I'm improvising and that's exactly what I'm going to encourage you to do as well because fresh fruits and vegetables they don't have uniform tastes so whereas when you go to bake a cookie or a pie you're going to use flour and baking soda and a little bit of salt and sugar and all those things generally taste the same fresh fruits and vegetables and greens they all vary in their tastes you can have one tomato that's very sweet and one tomato that's very sour and if a recipe calls for one tomato it generally doesn't note a sweet or sour one and yet that variance could drastically change the taste of the final ingredients so more importantly than giving you a recipe I want to teach you how to throw these ingredients together how to balance the flavors so that you're guaranteed to have a delicious product every single time this is also a lot more convenient because maybe not everybody's going to want to go to the store and get the exact same ingredients that I have on hand it's much easier to just look into your fridge see what you have available and then work with those ingredients so I invite you to not use what I say here as gospel improvise as you see fit use this information kind of like a CD skip the track so you don't like listen to the tracks that you love capiche sound good okay let's hop to it so the very first step in making a delicious salad is getting a nice big bowl to work with I like stainless steel it's very easy to clean it's very easy to mix in these bowls but you don't necessarily have to use stainless steel you can use wood or ceramic or whatever the important thing here is that it has to be big enough for you to be able to make your salad and mix it one of the first mistakes people make while trying to cook is they don't get a big enough vessel to contain the ingredients and that way when you go to mix stuff it doesn't really work stuff starts spilling and you don't get like uniform cherry tomatoes or carrot slices all throughout the salad and it's just not as fun so step number one protip get a big bowl I'm probably going to make a salad that's gonna fit in here but just to be safe I'm gonna go with the bigger bowl so let's put that over here another thing that I want to note real quick is that I've already pre-washed all of these veggies some of these are garden veggies here's some like mustard greens and kales that came out of my garden some of those are from a CSA that I got from a local farm and some things like this cabbage have come from the store so I have a wide arrangement of different ingredients that I'm gonna be working with so the first thing that you want to do is work on your base and your base is going to be like your greens things like kale lettuce endive that kind of thing and you know it's not rocket science you're just gonna shake it off any excess water and just start chopping with things like lettuce because it's very tender I like to leave slightly bigger chunks because I think that it's very nice it adds a really nice texture and size to a salad so my lettuces I generally don't chop all that fine because it's nice when it goes into the mouth this is some endive same story for this it's gonna go in the bowl we have some green garlic we'll get back to that let's do the lettuce first some people like to rip their lettuce that's totally fine I think a knife works pretty good too so I just chopped everything with the knife yeah we're gonna do the same thing to the endive and you go and you can see that just by using two different types of lettuce we're already putting interesting textures into our salad this already is something that you can't buy at most restaurants most restaurants will serve you baby greens from Costco maybe spinach or romaine lettuce generally speaking they're not gonna have red leaf lettuce or endive so you're already winning you're already making a salad that you probably can't purchase elsewhere next on the agenda where you have some cabbage now cabbage is a little bit more fibrous than lettuce so when I go and chop cabbage into the salad I'm gonna make slightly thinner slices because I want that texture to be very pleasant you know so you don't have to go too crazy but thinner slices than the lettuce and then we'll slice it in half and throw it right on top then we'll keep working I like to mix my salad as I go continuously because I find that my ingredients then are more uniform throughout the salad one thing I really don't like is when somebody slices up tomatoes or bell peppers something really tasty and then they throw it on top give it a very crappy mix and then all those ingredients wind up at the bottom of the barrel and so the first people that dig it into the salad they're eating only lettuce and the last people are eating only Tomatoes we want everybody who tastes this salad to have all kinds of different flavors okay so next on the agenda we're gonna keep doing our lettuces and here we have some we have some radish greens these are just the green leaves from radish perhaps you didn't know but not only is the radish itself edible but the leaves are very nutritious and very delicious we have some mustard flowers which we'll get back to I'm going to use those as a garnish later on a little beet and we have some baby kale a couple different varieties so again here we're going to go through we're going to chop some of this stuff up adding more texture to our delicious nutritious salad also these little stems they're completely edible but I like to not throw them in the salad just because it's a little bit more pleasant for the eater so those go in the compost you know if if it's a baby green kale like that's probably fine to throw the stem in but as it starts to mature this gets tough and fibrous and so it's it's more pleasant if it's gone and this isn't rocket science so if you get a couple stems in there nobody's going to hold it against you and nobody's probably even going to notice alright that's looking really nice more compost dumping rot BAM boom and more mixing okay look at that that's already gorgeous you have four or five different greens in here cabbage kale lettuce mustard this is a millionaire salad right here and so far it hasn't cost me very much okay so check it out isn't that pretty this right here you can just put in a Tupperware and stick in the fridge and then use throughout the week that's one another little pro tip that I'm gonna give you is that you can pre make different salad mixes and instead of buying a salad mix from Costco that comes in a bag and creates waste you can make your own salad mixes which are way better way more nutritious and there's no waste all of the waste this is created was actually compost that's later gonna go in my garden and it's gonna actually improve the quality of my soil next year once that's done I'm gonna start working on my tomatoes tomatoes out of the garden are so much better than store-bought Tomatoes it's like a world of difference in fact some people say they don't like tomatoes and then I they tried tomatoes that come from a garden in my salad and it blows them away because it's a completely different fruit and yes tomatoes are fruit so similar to the kale we're gonna cut the little butts of the tomatoes out because some people don't like that texture I'm not that picky myself but I'm not the only one who's going to be eating this salad and I want to make sure that everybody has a nice experience so I'm going to consider others and cut out any unpleasant textures for tomatoes it helps to have a serrated knife because tomatoes are soft and unless your knife is very sharp it's not going to cut through a tomato very well now I've been a bad boy here recently and I haven't taken time to sharpen my knives so that's something I need to do very soon here and until then serrated knife it is don't be afraid to add heaps of tomatoes to your salad tomatoes give salads like a very sweet Pleasant flavour and sweetness is a very important flavor to add to recipes coming up here soon when we make the dressing I'm going to talk about the importance of balancing the five basic flavors and Tomatoes will help with that because they're gonna add sweetness to the salad and they're just gonna make even people who don't like salads liked them more because of that sweet taste so spend a little extra money and throw up an extra few tomatoes in the salad I promise it'll pay off in the end especially if you have picky eaters in the house maybe kids or husbands or wives so for a salad of that size I basically used about a pint of mixed tomatoes and then you dump them on top now as this thing starts getting more and more soupy I'm going to start mixing it with a spoon but certainly you can dig in with your hands too there's nothing wrong with that moving right along let's do some peas these are sugar snap peas they're very sweet and delicious whoop drop one a little trick two peas the tips and Tails of them are slightly fibrous so we're going to cut those off because again we want people to enjoy the recipe that we create and then we're going to cut them in half and just start throwing them on top I like to line them up in a row save a little bit of time and just cut the tops off five in one go again it's not rocket science find a method that works well for you this is just something that I figured out over the years now maybe some of you are sitting over there thinking man this is very labor intensive I don't want to put that much effort into my meal and to that I'm gonna say when you put effort into your meal that's what makes it truly delicious when your loved ones feel like you've put your energy into it you've put intention into it I mean that's really the difference between a good recipe and an incredible one so you know use it as a meditation don't think about it as chores just think about it as I love my wife or I love my girlfriend I love my kids and I want the best for them and because I do I'm taking extra effort to make it delicious look at that there's another little preview mm-hmm my yoga teacher Tomeo recently said the way you do anything is the way you do everything so yeah put that little extra effort in and I promise it'll pay off in the end okay what else we have some young garlic's in here I'm going to take some of the greens from this garlic and throw it on top of my salad very finely chop this stuff and a little goes a long way so yeah it's a big salad let's do the whole thing know when our cameras gonna have smell attached to them this garlic smells incredible okay look at that it's gorgeous right let's give it a nice little mix next let's do some corn so I have some white corn that I've husked and it's raw hasn't been boiled it's also slightly sweet this is gonna add more texture and flavor to the salad and I'm just gonna pull lay it off the cob straight in just like that about a bing bada boom what else aha so we got a cucumber and a cucumber is nice sliced and some people like to peel the entire thing but because this came out of my garden and there's nutrition in the skin I don't want to get rid of all of it the skin of a garden cucumber also hasn't been waxed so you don't really necessarily need to peel it there's no negative aspects of the peel when it comes from your garden so what I'm going to do just kind of for style and beauty is I'm going to go go through and just peel some of it and that will accomplish a couple things so when I slice the cucumber it's gonna give it more intention and more that's gonna be more interesting so when I'm sitting and eating the salad over dinner it'll be maybe a conversation starter how did you get your cucumber to look that way maybe not maybe nobody will even notice or care but I'll know you know what that's kind of it's kind of a thick cucumber let's slice this stuff in half boom in you go another little pro tip is you can pre slice the cucumber not all the way so that it still stays together and then as you slice they just come off already pre sliced we're learning together we're learning right okay it's getting pretty full and I'm gonna unsay what I just said a few minutes ago at this point I think my hand will do a better job mixing so I'm gonna abandon the spoon and just get a little sloppy Lala see I could have even done with a bigger bowl that's okay okay what's next we have a few more ingredients and then we'll wrap this up and work on the dressing we have a beet some kohlrabi and at least one carrot let's do the carrot first so traditionally most people just go and grate a carrot but that's already been done and over done so we're gonna do something a little bit more fancy you're gonna take the sharpest knife that you have and you're very carefully actually let's slice it in half because it's slightly safer so you're very carefully gonna notch out some V's so you're gonna cut down the length of the carrot and make at least three V's kind of like that you don't want to cut too deep because you want the carrot to maintain its circular shape and then you do it again you got to be kind of careful because this isn't exactly the safest practice but people love this stuff for a dinner party this stuff is incredible so we're gonna do it to both pieces perfect that's actually working out quite nicely okay so see what I did there I put three deep V's like a little v-necks into the carrots and now when I go through and slice this bad boy look at what I have little ninja star discs made of carrot when you do this to your carrots people will remember this stuff for life I kid you not long after they've eaten the salad they're gonna talk about this extra step that you took to make their meal magical that's happened to me before it's probably gonna happen again and you know feel free to steal this because it's memorable oops boom check it out how cool is that pretty if I may say so myself just getting pretty full I'm feeling like we're getting close I might leave the kohlrabi yeah why not not everybody seen a kohlrabi let's do it okay so I called Robbie it's kind of like a turnip but it tastes much better so what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut it in half and then we're gonna peel off the skin skin is totally edible but again it's a texture thing kohlrabi is kind of taste like an apple mixed with a radish like a sweet apple so we're gonna use half of the kohlrabi just for a little extra umph and this my friends is the oldest grater ever I've had this thing for over 20 years what is the best grater I've ever found I know it looks not kind of gnarly but this sucker is sharp so it's still in my family so sharp in fact it you have to be very careful when grading stuff because you can grate your finger right in so there you go there's a little kohlrabi let's give it a nice little mix again and as you can see if this was a millionaire salad before announced a billionaires salad you literally cannot buy this type of salad anywhere not in a fancy five-star restaurant know where this is something you have to make yourself well BAM I'm not gonna use the beat because the salad already has a lot of color I don't want to go overboard and Plus everybody already knows what beats are anyway now typically how I would put it in the salad as I just grate the raw beet about a bing bada boom but today I'm gonna skip that okay let's do a little cleanup and then we'll put the finishing touches on our salad make the dressing and then call it quits okay so this stage in the salad I want to garnish it now it already looks beautiful but I can make it look even more beautiful by just adding a few simple things to it so I have some herbs over here this is always a good vent this will make a somewhat bland salad taste incredibly aromatic and again a little goes a long way you could just take some scissors and just chop some dill in if you don't like dill no problem use cilantro use parsley use whatever you like I also have some purple basil same basic story go through and just chop some basil in here this is a tiny bunch of basil so I'm going to do the whole thing look at that and because I can out of my garden I have two different types of flowers I have some radish flowers these are the purple ones the pink ones and then I also have some mustard flowers these are yellow and I'm going to chop those in the salad too simply because they're pretty well not simply because mustard mustard greens mustard flowers are some of the most nutritious plants on this earth and so I want to get those in my system any way that I can and a good way to do that is through a big salad just like this when my girlfriend Kylie and I make salads like this together we lovingly refer to them as hash tag big-ass salad and by now you could probably see why so look at that how gorgeous is that I mean am i right or am i right that is a good-looking salad right there I'm salivating I want to end this video right now to go eat this salad but we're not quite there yet we've got to make the dressing so for the dressing most people run to the store and get a dressing because they're like oh I don't know how to make dressing newsflash making dressing is the easiest thing in the world in order to make a good gourmet dressing you just have to balance the five basic flavors that's 1 B and 4 s's bitter sweet sour salty and spicy bitter sweet sour salty and spicy I can't actually articulate my hands that well bitter sweet sour salty and spicy those five flavors are flavors that correspond to taste buds on our tongue and if we balance all I have flavors when we eat food with all five flavors in it that's what we call gourmet food when all five major taste bud areas get stimulated our mouth goes mmm wow this is incredible and that really makes the difference between okay food delicious food and you know mouth-watering jaw-dropping food so today we're going for mouth-watering and jaw-dropping and we're gonna balance the five flavors so the base for our dressing today is going to be extra virgin olive oil I don't have any particular brand that I'm using today this is just the olive oil I had on hand this has Trader Joe's but you can use whatever it is at home and now we're gonna start balancing the flavors and I'll show you just how that's done so bitter sweet sour salty and spicy can you guess what lemon is which flavour is lemon I'm going to give you a couple seconds indeed lemon is our sour so we're gonna squeeze in some lemon we're gonna do an entire lemon again I want to digress real quickly and say that for this dressing proportions are not crucial if you add a little bit more oil and less lemon it's not really gonna be a deal-breaker more importantly is balancing the basic flavors so for our sour we are going to use lemon for our salty we're gonna use salt this is sea salt and we're just gonna throw a little bit in mix it around for our bitter well first of all you don't need a whole lot of bitter in a recipe you just need a tiny little amount and our bitter is already in the salad in the form of basil basil is a little bit bitter Dyl is a little bit bitter and some of our mustards are a little bit bitter so that flavor is already taken care of so we have bitter in the salad in the form of our greens we also have lemon which is sour we have salt which is salty we need a little bit of sweet so for sweetness today I'm going to use a little bit of honey maybe like a teaspoon teaspoon and a half if you don't like honey you can use cane sugar or agave or maple syrup that's really up to you I like to use a little bit of nutritional yeast this also adds a little bit of bitterness to it and nutritional yeast is something we lovingly refer to as hippie dust in our household so a little bit of hippie dust for spicy we're gonna use a little bit of pepper black pepper again for certain ingredients you don't need as much as others so while your gonna want a little bit more salty you don't need as much spicy a little bit of cracked pepper it does the trick and then we mix I like these little jars because I can put a lid on them and then I can mix them in the same way that a hardware store mixes paint thoroughly and there you have it here's a very nice gourmet vinaigrette but we're not done yet we want to make sure that it actually tastes good so what we're gonna do is we're gonna taste this dressing to make sure that all the tape the five flavors are balanced and at first it's very hard to figure out Oh does it is it missing a little bit of salty or does it need a little bit more sweet so what I recommend for beginners is to taste your dressing five times and each time you ask yourself one question is it spicy enough is it bitter enough is it sour enough is it sweet enough and so on and so forth and in that way you're going to train your brain to be able to CERN which flavors it has enough of and which flavors it's missing so always try your food first because if you don't like it chances are other people won't like it too this stuff tastes incredible mmm yummy we did good Sergei we did good at this point we only have one more decision left to make and that decision is are we gonna eat the salad right away or are we gonna store it for later so if we're gonna eat the salad right away it makes sense to dress this salad now and then leave the guesswork for our guests out of it the trouble is that this has salt in it and lemon and that will make lettuce shrink and kind of lose water so if you're not going to eat the salad within the next half an hour I would say cover this dressing with the lid which I have now misplaced here we go and stick it in the fridge and dress it right before you eat it at a later time you can also put this salad in Tupperware put some you know plastic wrap over this and stick it in the fridge and like this in this form this salad will keep for up to a week easy this is more than a couple meals right here so you're actually saving yourself time there you have it folks there's a beautiful salad with delicious dressing and it's something that you can make for yourself that you can't buy anywhere else something that's gonna wow your friends it's gonna wow your taste buds and you're gonna be healthier for it if you liked this video and want to give it a shot by all means do it I would love to see your salads if you're open to sharing them with me and so I'm gonna start a new hashtag called hashtag big ass salad on Instagram and if you want to share your creation with me and show me what you came up with I'd love to see it so head on over to Instagram post a picture of your salad make sure to add the hashtag hashtag big ass salad and that way I'll be sure to see it thanks for watching ciao

Channel: BoutenkoFilms

Views: 1,808,727

Rating: 4.7833285 out of 5

Keywords: salad, recipe, food prep, cook, cooking, how to, how-to, salad dressing, Sergei Boutenko, Delicious, Yummy, homemade, food, vegetables, healthy, organic, nutritous, vegan, vegetarian, chop, cut, prepare, tasty

Id: cvAqC_HgVT4

Length: 39min 39sec (2379 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019